In the office today we had an old Apple iBook G4. The computer had been sitting around in a cabinet for longer than I’ve been working here. Someone decided they wanted to use it to learn their way around a Mac (the office being primarily windows). Seemed like a perfect use for the older laptop. I booted up the laptop and tried to log into the admin account, no luck. The only account I could access was a limited account that wouldn’t let you do much of anything. So now I have the problem of figuring out how to get on the computer, without using the install disks (which had been long gone). The solution was surprisingly easy.
- Boot computer and hold the ‘apple’ key (command key) and the ‘s’ key
- Wait for the terminal to show
- Release keys
- Type (without the quotes): ‘/sbin/mount -uaw’
- Press enter
- Type (without the quotes): ‘rm /var/db/.applesetupdone
- Press enter
- Type (without the quotes): ‘reboot’
- Press enter
When the computer boots back up again, it acts like you just booted up for the first time. It lets you create an admin account and password for the computer (this time I made the password simple enough to remember). The best part though, is that nothing is deleted from before. All the extra software we had on the computer is still installed. Nothing got deleted, all that was done was creating a new admin account. Its a neat trick for older laptops. I haven’t tried this on new computers or OS’s. If you have any luck, leave it in the comments.